The New York Times goes outside the box...

And the publishers may well be right out of their minds.

Consider this:

Still, the simple truth is that a great democracy like ours deserves a first-rate newspaper of record. And the New York Times isn't it.

So, one would think that the New York Times would steer itself clear of the person who wrote that. Surely, if, for example, you were on record as having said that, publicly, there would be no reason for you to expect to be given the slightest consideration for employment at the New York Times.

Apparently, that isn't the case.

A day after the Huffington Post first reported it, The New York Times has announced that it has indeed hired conservative pundit, and Fox News analyst, Bill Kristol, as a new regular op-ed columnist.

Liberal bloggers had been up in arms over the move. Kristol said, in an interview with Politico.com, it gave him some pleasure to see their "heads explode." Kristol was perhaps the most influential pundit of all in promoting the U.S. invasion of Iraq and has strongly defended the move ever since.

Times' editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal defended the move. Rosenthal told Politico.com shortly after the official announcement Saturday that he fails to understand “this weird fear of opposing views....We have views on our op-ed page that are as hawkish or more so than Bill....

“The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual — and somehow that’s a bad thing,” Rosenthal added. “How intolerant is that?”

Well, for one thing, suggesting that Kristol is serious, respected or intellectual raises questions about Rosenthal's ability to reason. It has little to do with intolerance.

Kristol is a spoiled, self-praising frat-boy with a long record of being wrong on just about everything, and with a willingness to waste lives on foolish and dangerous endeavours providing he doesn't personally have to get his hands dirty. He treats the deaths of American service personnel as mere currency to finance a failed political ideology and he treats the hundreds of thousands of deaths of civilians world-wide as little more than fertilizer for a field of Republican dreams.

He is an elitist of the worst kind who views himself as infallible. When he is proved wrong, as has happened countless times, he simply shrugs it off and crawls back into his comfortable hole, safe and protected from the carnage he helped create. No apologies; no admission of failure.

Couple all that with the inherent dishonesty of the individual. After Bush's second inaugural address in 2005, Kristol lavished praise on Bush's speech and the direction it took. He spoke on FOX political programs and wrote in his Weekly Standard that Bush's speech was "sophisticated and nuanced". That speech has now been widely panned as nothing less than a signal to expand American hegemony and a PNAC pipe-dream which failed to address anything close to reality. The Bush Doctrine. What Kristol did not tell anyone, while he was heaping praise on the prose, is that he himself helped write it.

The planning of Bush's second inaugural address began a few days after the Nov. 2 election with the president telling advisers he wanted a speech about "freedom" and "liberty." That led to the broadly ambitious speech that has ignited a vigorous debate. The process included consultation with a number of outside experts, Kristol among them.

One meeting, arranged by Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, included military historian Victor Davis Hanson, columnist Charles Krauthammer and Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, according to one Republican close to the White House. White House senior adviser Karl Rove attended, according to one source, but mostly listened to what became a lively exchange over U.S. policy and the fight for liberty.

Expanding on Kristol's elitism is his belief in an American aristocracy; a conservative American aristocracy. For all his rhetorical spouting of the Bush Doctrine of spreading democracy, he is quite happy to see democratic rights diminish on his own soil. Further, he believes the conservative ruling class should be exempt from the consequences of their actions, even if members of that class have blatantly ignored the law.

He screamed loud and hard that Scooter Libby, found guilty of obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame "outing" investigation, should be pardoned and went so far as to state that Libby should not have been charged at all. What he was publicly demanding is that someone who held a position of public trust should be exempt from criminal prosecution and punishment because of his rank within the ruling class. He demanded that Libby be immediately pardoned - by the person who was Libby's boss - based on the premise that Libby had been prosecuted by someone who was not of the conservative ruling class and who's low rank should not have permitted him to investigate the matter in the first place.

And now is the time for it. If the president does intend to pardon Libby, there is no reason to wait. The president will learn nothing important about the case during the appeals process that he doesn't already know. He told an interviewer Wednesday, "I'm pretty much going to stay out of it" until the case has run its course. Why? There's no good reason now for him "to stay out of it." This whole prosecution happened only because of a desire by Bush's agents--the attorney general and the deputy attorney general--to "stay out of it" in late 2003, which led to the appointment of Fitzgerald as an unaccountable special prosecutor.

This is the kind of individual the New York Times editorial page editor, Andy Rosenthal, believes will provide a "conservative" viewpoint: A dishonest, self-admiring imperialist wrapped in an overwhelming sense of entitlement.

And the acceptance of the position by Kristol himself is a demonstration of his principles. Clearly, he has none. After saying this:

The Times is irredeemable. The question is whether a new newspaper of record will replace it.

Why would he even consider taking a position on that same newspaper?

Easy.

The New York Times has just engaged the services of a whore.

The only question now is how much Kristol's blow-job is going to cost.